Jar of Hearts
by irishais
Summary: Death is routine for homicide detectives Almasy and Trepe, until a virus sweeps through Galbadia, and the dead are no longer content to stay that way. AU.
1. zero

**{jar of hearts}**

_-irishais-_

_One: zero_

They were slow-dancing around the living room, half-drunk on cheap wine, and Seifer ran his hand down her arm gently, grazing over the bandage there.

She inhaled, and he stilled his hand.

"Sorry," he murmured into her hair.

"It just stings," she responded, and rested her cheek against the soft worn fabric of his shirt. "I'm fine."

He sighed, the sound lost in a swell of music, and he led Quistis around the room again.

_xx_

The call came in at two in the morning, and she fumbled her hand out from under the blanket to grab her cell phone, insistently buzzing against the worn wood of the nightstand.

"Trepe," she murmured, and Seifer rolled over next to her, draping his arm across her waist.

"Tell 'em to go to hell," he muttered, and Quistis swatted away his hand as he made to take the phone from her.

"I'll be right there," she said, and as soon as she hung up, Seifer's phone rang. She flung aside the blanket and got out of bed, leaving Seifer to mutter and swear as he dug around in the pile of clothes on the floor for his phone.

_xx_

Seifer pulled into the officers' lot of the Deling City police station, and Quistis was already waiting for him next to their unmarked squad car, impeccably dressed and styled, holding two go-cups of coffee in her hands.

She handed him one as he approached. "We're going to the hotel," she said. "There's been a murder."

He took a deep draught of the coffee. "Sounds like fun. I'll drive."

She flipped the keys to him, and he snatched them out of the air.

The drive to the Galbadia Hotel was uneventful—there wasn't much traffic on the road at three in the morning. He put the sirens on, anyway.

Quistis was quiet, only interrupting the silence long enough to brief him on the victim—Rinoa Heartilly, a politician's daughter, killed in her hotel room. Her fiancé had come back from a meeting, only to find her shot to death during his brief absence.

"How's your arm?" Seifer asked, disregarding his turn signal as he pulled into an empty spot outside the hotel. He killed the sirens, then the engines, and glanced over at her.

She rubbed her bicep absently, like she had already forgotten about the injury. She probably had—Quistis had an irritating habit of moving on from events like they'd never happened. A grazed arm from a psycho drug dealer probably didn't even register on her scale of "important." "It's fine. Let's go."

The crime scene was cordoned off with yellow police tape, and Seifer ducked under it as Quistis bypassed the doorway, making a beeline for a distraught, dark-haired man in a rumpled suit. The hotel room was a wreck, the lamp shattered on the floor and the body of the victim sprawled out across the muted floral bedspread, blood coagulating beneath her and smeared across the floor. He paused at the entryway, taking in the scene before him.

"She didn't stand a chance." Dr. Kadowaki, Galbadia P.D.'s medical examiner, said without preamble as Seifer approached. "It looks like she tried to take a swing at someone with the lamp, but they put half a clip into her, and the rest of it into the furniture. Death would've been pretty quick after they hit her in the heart."

Seifer stepped closer to the bed and stared down at the girl's face. Her dark eyes were focused on the ceiling, and her mouth was slightly open, leaving her looking as if she had simply been surprised, and not brutally slaughtered. Her flowing evening gown was draped around her, wings of blue silk stained with drying blood.

She looked very small, very fragile, very, very dead.

He turned away as a crime scene tech moved in to take more photos of the body, and crouched next to a shattered champagne flute, pulling a latex glove from his coat pocket. There was a smudge on one of the larger pieces of thin glass- perhaps it would be able to give up more answers than Rinoa Heartilly's unlovely corpse.

_xx_

"Squall Leonhart?"

He was standing in front of the big picture window at the end of the hallway, staring blankly at the pre-dawn skyline, and made no indication that he had heard her.

"I'm Detective Trepe. I need to ask you a few questions about what happened here tonight." She flipped her small notepad open and clicked her pen. "Could you tell me what happened?"

He didn't look away from the window. "I had a meeting with some investors at a restaurant down the street. It was only supposed to be a couple of hours. We had some drinks, I came back, and she was—" He paused, and sucked in a great lungful of air, but the exhale was hitched, uneven.

She gave him a moment. "Did Miss Heartilly have any enemies you were aware of? Any ex-boyfriends, maybe?"

Leonhart rubbed the bridge of his nose wearily. "No, no one serious."

"Family?"

"No." The word came out sharply. "Her father is a jerk, but he wouldn't kill her."

"Do you know where we can find him?"

Squall dug in his pocket for his cell phone, tapped the screen, and turned it around for her to read. "I only have it so I know when he calls to harass her."

Quistis jotted down the number, and the name over the entry in Squall's phone. "Does he harass her often?"

"Not so much now. Just when he's drunk."

She reached in her own pocket and withdrew one of her business cards from her badge wallet. "If you can think of anyone else we should speak to, call me at one of these numbers."

Squall took the card from her without looking at it. "Find them, Detective."

_xx_

"Fury Caraway," Quistis mused, nursing her second refill as they sat in a small back booth at a nearby diner. "Why does that name sound familiar?"

"He's a general in the Galbadian army. He's also a rank-A asshole, if you ask me. He was publicly ripped apart by the news for some torture scandal a couple of years back. And Leonhart says he couldn't have killed his own daughter? He's an idiot. Or he's lying about something." Seifer shoveled another forkful of pancake into his mouth—the plate had been sitting in front of him for approximately five minutes, and already, half of the enormous meal was eaten.

Quistis split the egg yolk on her plate neatly with her fork, watching the yellow run down the white of the egg. "Either way, we're going to have to interview Caraway."

Seifer made a noise of agreement from the depths of his coffee.

"Maybe…" She trailed off, studying her small notepad, her neat handwriting almost perfectly legible even viewed upside down, from where he was sitting.

There was a brief commotion outside, some loud voices muffled through the glass, and both of them instinctively looked up. A small knot of people stood in front of the diner, still dressed in their late night party clothes, despite the early morning sunrise. At least a couple of them were still drunk, swaying on their feet.

The source of the argument seemed to come in the form of a more shabbily dressed man, homeless, or nearly so, by the looks of him. His hand was stretched out in front of him, and his mouth was moving, slowly, like he was having trouble forming words. One of the girls in the group was reaching into her tiny, ridiculous bag, a couple of gil in her hands.

Quistis watched—for some reason, she couldn't look away from the scene, even though she had seen a thousand like it before. Seifer had already returned to his meal, after he'd turned her notebook around to read what she had written.

"You need to write a dictionary of your shorthand or something, because I have no idea what this says," he muttered, flipping through a few pages.

Quistis glanced down at the page he was looking at, and in that second, the screaming started.

They were out of the booth in a shot, hands on their weapons as they ran for the door. The girl in the pink sequined party dress was stumbling back away from the man, her hand dripping blood, the gil fluttering out of her grasp. She was screaming the loudest, and the man was stumbling for her again, hands outstretched.

"—_bit her_! He bit her!"

"Police!" Seifer yelled, and it was all the warning the guy got as he was tackled to the ground, letting out a strangled moan as he was hit.

Quistis came up next to the girl. "Are you okay?" she asked.

The girl shook her head, tears streaming down her cheeks. "He _bit _me," she said, her voice a bit incredulous. "I was just giving him some money—I thought that was what he wanted, and he just sank his teeth into my hand!"

Quistis heard the click and some muffled swearing as Seifer ratcheted his handcuffs around the man's wrists. She pulled her cell phone out, made the requisite calls, and within five minutes, she could hear the wailing sirens as they rounded the corner.

_xx_

"This is weird."

Quistis looked up from her paperwork and raised an eyebrow at Xu. The captain was swiping through something on her datapad, an eyebrow raised, the curve of her lips bordering on glee.

"What?"

"Twenty assault call-ins today, all with various bite-induced injuries."

"Full moon?" Quistis asked, typing in her ID number at the bottom of the report, and hitting the send key. Xu's datapad chirped again. "Because Almasy and I ran across the same thing earlier today."

"Almasy? You call him that in the bedroom?"

Quistis felt her cheeks turn scarlet before she could even form a response. "I—what?"

Xu paged through Quistis' report. "I am pretty sure people in Esthar know you're involved with him. I appreciate you keeping things discreet, however—Almasy is a much better actor than I ever gave him credit for. Close your mouth before something flies in there."

The captain turned on her heel and left, weaving her way back through the desks in the station. As soon as she was gone, a dozen quick responses popped into Quistis' head. Naturally. Everything she could have said, now that the moment had blown past her.

"What'd she want?" Seifer asked, dropping down into his chair with a fresh cup of coffee in one hand and a file of neatly organized printouts in another.

"Nothing," Quistis said quickly, and turned her attention back to her computer. There were several tabs open on Rinoa Heartilly, her fiancé, and General Caraway—it was a lot of information to sift through, and she could not allow herself to be thrown off course. "Is that General Caraway's jacket?" she asked, nodding toward the folder.

Seifer passed it to her. "It's mostly junk—they've censored so much of it, they might as well have just told us 'no' when we asked for it."

"Well, we have to start somewhere," she said, and settled back in her chair to start reading.

_xx_

Her phone rang at half past midnight, and Quistis fumbled for it.

"Trepe," she mumbled.

"Hey, it's me." Seifer sounded antsy, wide awake, like he'd drunk about six cups of coffee in ten minutes. "You remember the girl we helped this morning? The one who got bit?"

Quistis rubbed the heel of her hand into her eyes, one after another, in an effort to wake up. "Yeah?"

"She's dead."

Quistis stilled. "Wait, what? How?"

Seifer exhaled. "I don't know. They think maybe an infection of some sort. It's fucked up. It gets weirder."

"Seifer—"

"She died. She was confirmed dead."

"Yes, I got that the first time you said it."

"She was dead, and then she _wasn't_."

"What, they resuscitated her?"

"No. She was gone. They pulled the sheet over her face. The doctor who called it said he called for an orderly, and when they came to take the body to the morgue, she sat up and assaulted the guy. Ripped a chunk of flesh out of his arm. He's in surgery, and she's gone. She ran for it."

Quistis didn't speak for a few moments, trying to process the information. A girl, dead from a bite to the hand from a vagrant, who had probably assaulted a number of other people before Seifer tackled him to the ground. The same girl, no longer dead, running through the streets, inexplicably violent.

"Oh, my god," she breathed. "Are you still at the hospital?"

"Yeah."

"I'm on my way."


	2. gestation

_Two: gestation_

The orderly was in quarantine, his arm bandaged up to the elbow, still sleeping from the anesthetic. His chest rose and fell steadily underneath the thin blanket, a few machines whirring and beeping behind him.

"He looks okay for now," the doctor said, and Quistis glanced away from the window. "He's stable—he hasn't shown any signs of infection yet. The clean room is just a precaution."

"That's what the ER doctors said about Georgia Mason, wasn't it? That she was stable?" She marked a shorthand version of his comment down on her notepad—everyone, Seifer included, had gone to small recording units, but Quistis was old-fashioned that way—and waited for his response.

"That was the initial report, yes, but we're now thinking it was some sort of unexpected chemical reaction—Miss Mason claimed to have no allergies, but more often than not, everyone develops a reaction to something sooner or later, and it might've just been unfortunate timing."

"She was pronounced dead, and stayed that way for an hour before she wasn't, and you want to blame that on an allergic reaction?"

"Look, I don't know what happened. Maybe it was a stroke. We tried to shock her, we tried manual CPR, we couldn't save her, and so I called it. I don't know what happened, but it was probably just a freak accident." His pager went off at his waist, and the doctor glanced at it. "I have to get down to the ER," he said. "If that's all?"

Quistis nodded. "Thank you for your time," she said. "We'll be in touch."

Seifer met her in the lobby. "I got a call. Portables found her, shot to death by a store clerk a few blocks over. He thought she was trying to rob the place. Said she was acting all crazy and high, and wouldn't respond when he tried to get her to stop." He scowled as they pushed through the big double doors. "Get anything new from the doc?"

"Nothing useful. He's calling it an allergic reaction."

He snorted. "That's clever."

She yanked open the passenger door to the car. "Yeah. Hey, drop me off at Kadowaki's office. I want to see if I can't get some answers from her autopsy."

"What do you want me to do while you're sticking your hands in guts?"

"Go interview our attacker. Maybe you can learn something new."

_xx_

She was, indeed, up to her triple-gloved and scrub-covered elbows in Georgia Mason's innards, assisting Dr. Kadowaki with the autopsy, when the shouting started.

"What on earth—" Kadowaki started, stepping away from the body and toward the footsteps racing toward them. The big metal doors of Autopsy One burst open.

"Seifer!" Quistis exclaimed. "What the hell?"

He ran in, the captain on his heels. "Come on," he barked. "We're getting out of here."

"What's going on?" she demanded.

"Detective, I hate to agree with Almasy, but that is an order—get dressed." Xu had her weapon drawn, and kept peering out the narrow windows.

"What about the station?" Quistis repeated, stripping off her gloves quickly and yanking the blue scrub shirt over her head. She was suddenly grateful she'd kept her tank top on underneath the scrubs, despite Autopsy's overly warm lighting. "The interview?"

"There was no interview," Seifer said. "Our suspect was stuck in the drunk tank, along with every other loser in Deling. He attacked them, and they started attacking the guards who came by, and it all went to shit."

"We've got to go," the captain ordered. "The hall's clear, but I don't know how much longer this building's going to stay secure."

Quistis picked up her holster from Kadowaki's desk, and strapped it around her waist as the doctor hastily repacked Georgia's organs, pulling the wrap back over the body and pushing the drawer back in its cold storage cabinet.

"Come _on_! She's dead, I don't think she'll mind being left out of this!" Seifer pushed open the door to Autopsy, sweeping the hallway with his gun low, ready to fire if he needed to.

"Clear!" Xu said. "Okay, people, stay together, stay close, and you have my permission to shoot as needed." There was a grim sort of smile on her face.

"Captain—"

"Trepe, I will fill you in on all the excitement you missed later, but I would like to stay alive, and I am pretty sure you do, too."

"Okay, people, while we're young," Seifer called, from down at the far end of the hallway. "Or at least living!"

Quistis pushed Kadowaki past her, and unsnapped her holster.

_xx_

Outside, it was pandemonium. A DCPD SUV was parked halfway up on the curb, sirens still screaming. Xu ran for it, Quistis and Kadowaki close behind her, while Seifer took up the rear.

A woman lurched up to them, arms outstretched, blood pooling around her mouth and a gash in her neck, her mouth moving unintelligibly, and Quistis had barely gotten her gun up, shouting, "Stop, _police_," before the woman's head exploded. She ducked just in time, the spray flecking onto her shoulder but missing her face.

"Seifer! What are you doing?" she shrieked. "She was _injured—_"

"She wasn't injured, she was _infected_," Seifer corrected. "Get in the car!" He pushed her up into the SUV, where she sat next to a shaking Kadowaki. Seifer slammed the door shut behind her and hauled himself into the front seat, barely getting his own door shut before Xu had lurched the SUV off of the curb and into the sea of people running in every direction.

Quistis stared out the window at the chaos. "Oh, my god," she whispered. "Wait!" she yelled, abruptly, as they tore down the street past the hotel.

A man was standing on top of a very expensive sports car, wielding what looked suspiciously like a tire iron, while a swarm of people surrounded him, clawing up at his feet. He swung the tire iron fiercely, coming into direct contact with a teenager's skull, the boy's head snapping sickeningly to the side as he dropped. The man pulled the iron back for another swing, and it suddenly hit Quistis that she _knew _him.

"That's Leonhart," she told Seifer. "That's Heartilly's fiancé. We have to help him. Captain, stop the car!"

Seifer swore, and Quistis thought she caught the words, "bleeding heart," in there, but he rolled the window down as Xu swung the SUV in a tight arc, bringing them right alongside Leonhart.

Seifer fired, fired again, two of the infected dropping with his precision shooting. Quistis yanked open her door, shooting as soon as she had enough clearance to stick her gun through.

"Come on!" she yelled, jumping out of the car, keeping her gun trained on the infected standing between her and Leonhart. "Get in!"

Leonhart took another wild swing with his tire iron, taking out a beautiful, blood-spattered red-headed woman as her skull buckled inward with the impact. With the aid of Seifer's expert marksmanship, they cleared out a narrow path, just enough space that Squall could push his way through the swarm, grabbing for Quistis' outstretched hand. She pulled him through the last few feet, shoving him behind her and turning to jump back in, slamming the door shut just as small brunette grabbed for her. There was a distraught howl; the door had caught three of the girl's perfectly manicured fingertips.

Xu gunned it, and the scream got louder as the car forcefully tore the arm off of the woman who was trying to get at them. Quistis let out an involuntary shriek, jerked opened the door a crack, and let the arm fall behind them, lost in the swarm that chased haphazardly after them.

"Shit!" Seifer said, and followed it up with more choice expletives, rolling up the window as they rocketed onward. "Are you alright? Any _more _witnesses you want to save?"

Quistis exhaled. "I'm fine," she said. "Are you okay?" she asked, ignoring Seifer's second question and turning her attention to Squall.

He nodded once, sharply, his fingers still clenched tightly around the tire iron. Blood dripped from one of the prongs, falling onto the dark carpet.

_Drip, drip, drip. _

"They came out of nowhere," he said, his tone sheer disbelief, staring straight ahead at the back of Seifer's seat. "I didn't know what else to do," he added, like he'd just realized he was in a car with three cops. "It was self-defense." He released the tire iron abruptly, and it hit the floor with a muffled thud.

"We're not going to arrest you, if that's what you're worried about," Seifer muttered from the front seat, ejecting the clip of his gun, presumably to check the amount of ammunition he had left. It was apparently satisfactory, because he shoved the clip back into the gun with a loud pop. Kadowaki jumped, and then let out a sharp, terrified laugh.

"Did any of them bite you? Scratch you?" Xu demanded.

Squall shook his head. "No."

"Trepe, check him. Make sure."

"Captain—"

"_Do it_," Xu ordered. "I'm not taking any chances of him turning into one of _them_."

Quistis looked at him apologetically. "Sorry, I need you to—"

Squall was already shrugging out of his expensive-looking suit coat, splashed with dark blood that she hoped wasn't his own. He undid the buttons of his shirt cuffs, and rolled up his sleeves. Quistis studied his arms carefully—he was surprisingly in shape for a businessman, looking like he spent more time at the gym than he did trading stocks or whatever he did.

"Twist around," she said, and he complied, turning in his seat so she could look at his back. The white fabric of his shirt was translucent with sweat, but intact.

She repeated the exam as best as she could with his legs, pausing as she came to a tear in his pants by his right knee, a long jagged rip. He had awkwardly contorted himself so his legs were crossed, and she was leaning half in his lap as she examined the tear more closely.

"Kadowaki," she said. "Do you have any gloves?"

The doctor fumbled in her pocket, and produced one thin latex glove. "Here—it's all I have."

Quistis tugged the glove on and eased up the fabric of Squall's pant leg, revealing the end of a black trouser sock and pale flesh speckled with dark body hair. With every inch the fabric moved, she found herself unconsciously praying that she wouldn't find anything.

She folded the fabric back around his kneecap and exhaled a breath she hadn't known she was holding. The flesh was unmarred. He must have snared the fabric on something. She sat back and pulled off the glove, handing it back to Kadowaki.

"He's clean," she announced. "No blood except what's spattered on his clothes."

"Get the jacket out of the car," Xu ordered. "I don't want to take any chances of that shit transferring onto us."

"Sorry," Quistis said again, and Squall nodded, pressing the button to roll down the window. He took the jacket by the collar and pitched it out of the car, the speed that they were traveling requiring little effort to send it flying down the street.

"As long as you don't ticket me for littering," he said, his expression so perfectly neutral that it took Quistis a moment to realize that he was joking as he rolled the window back up.


	3. greetings from timber

Three: greetings from timber

"—_again, this is an emergency broadcast. Deling City has been declared a quarantined hazard zone. If you are in Deling City, stay in your homes, and do not leave for any reason. If you are not in the city, please stay outside of the mandated five-mile quarantine zone, and do not enter Deling City for any reason. Again, this is a country-wide emergency broadcast. Deling City has been declared a quarantined—" _

"Could you shut that off?" Quistis murmured, her head back against the seat, her eyes closed in a desperate attempt to relax. It wasn't working out terribly well, and the static-filled radio wasn't helping matters very much.

They had been driving for hours, carefully negotiating the maze of wrecked and abandoned cars littering the roads directly out of Deling—Xu's suicidal driving techniques had resulted in them going through long, bumpy stretches of grass and dirt, avoiding the road altogether. Quistis had to commend her captain on the choice of escape vehicle; if they had taken any other car, they would've been stranded long ago, out of gas or out of road.

"The symptoms of the virus are lethargy with death-like symptoms, and then a sudden tendency toward aggression and violence. Avoid any contact with people displaying these symptoms. If you are attacked, seek medical attention immediately—local hospitals have set up quarantine wards—"

Quistis leaned forward, poking Seifer's shoulder through the thick metal grating that separated the front seat from the back.

He didn't say anything, just jabbed his thumb on the power button for the radio. Silence descended over the cabin, with the exception of the hiss of the patrol radio. Xu hadn't been able to raise anyone yet, outside of some useless garbled chatter.

"Shit," the captain muttered, as a chime sounded from within the dashboard.

"What?"

"We're gonna have to find a gas station."

For the first time in several hours, Squall spoke up. "There's an exit up ahead," he said. "A couple of gas stations, a motel."

"You from around here?" Xu asked.

He flattened his hands against his knees. "No. Rinoa-" Words seemed fail him, and he shut up, turning his attention to some indistinct point out the window.

Xu glanced at him in the mirror. "Trepe?" she said.

"Rinoa Heartilly. The murder case we were working on before—" Quistis wasn't really sure how to finish the sentence.

Squall snorted, softly.

_xx_

The gas station was tiny, tucked in a little one-horse town between a motel and a Wendigo's restaurant, just enough to tide someone over on a road trip to Timber from Deling City.

"All out for the head," Xu announced, rapping her knuckles against Kadowaki's door.

The doctor's eyes snapped open. Somewhere an hour or so back, she'd fallen asleep, and now she looked around blearily. Quistis envied her the small bit of rest. "Where are we?"

"Somewhere west of Timber," Quistis replied. "We're out of gas."

Her knees had locked up sometime during the ride, Quistis discovered, and she inhaled sharply as her feet hit the pavement. She bounced up and down lightly on her heels, and after a moment, the discomfort eased, glancing over at Seifer as he unfolded himself from the car. He caught her eye for a few seconds, then started toward the small convenience store, hand on his gun.

"You all from Deling City?" A man walked out of the shop, a shotgun hanging by his side. Quistis tensed, shifted her hand back toward her weapon.

"We're police," she said cautiously. "From DC, yeah."

"Cops, huh? You got badges to go with those guns?" The shotgun shifted forward; Quistis heard the very faint whine of nylon as Xu pulled her gun from her holster behind them.

Xu and Quistis pulled out their badge wallets—Seifer had, at some point, had the foresight to drape his shield around his neck, probably before he and Xu fled the station, and he lifted it away from his chest so the man could see.

He squinted at the badges, but didn't come any closer. The shotgun lowered a fraction of an inch.

"We're not infected," Xu said tersely. "We just need some gas and supplies."

"The card reader doesn't work," the man replied, after a long moment of deliberation. "Cash only."

Xu swore under her breath. "Who the _hell_ carries cash?' she muttered.

_xx_

Quistis stood in front of the sink in the tiny, bleach-scented restroom, scrubbing her hands for several minutes, making sure to get everything out from under her nails. The soap was scented chemical-lavender—it was making her a little nauseous.

There was a light knock on the door, a double-tap she knew well.

"Occupied," she called, unnecessarily.

"Yeah, I know," Seifer said, his voice muffled through the door. "We've gotta get on the road."

Quistis shut off the sink, and grabbed a stack of paper towels from the half-empty dispenser. The door handle turned. Seifer entered, squeezing himself between her and the door, and shut it behind him.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Besides the fact that our lives just turned into a horror movie? I'm wonderful," she replied, but it didn't come out as sarcastically snappy as she had intended. She leaned forward after a moment, resting her cheek against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her. "I keep trying to convince myself I've hallucinated the whole thing."

"We'll find out what happened," he said. "We'll be back home within a week, probably."

She laughed, a soft chuckle. "Yeah, sure. That's what they said in the movies, too."

When they got back into the SUV, Quistis found herself in the middle again, stuck between Squall and Seifer, since Kadowaki had seen fit to lay claim to the front seat.

"Asshole," Xu said, popping the tab on a monster-sized energy drink. She raised it in a mock salute to the proprietor, who was watching them leave. "I'm expensing the hell out of this trip, and I expect you all to validate it if the commissioner asks."

Wisely, silence was the response from the collective backseat, and Xu threw the SUV in gear, roaring out of the gas station.

Seifer squeezed Quistis' hand briefly, and it wasn't long before they had left the gas station far behind them.

_xx_

The roads into Timber were nearly as congested as the roads leading out of Deling, and Xu fired up the siren for a second run, parting the proverbial sea surprisingly easily; she only had to drive on the shoulder once before she was able to weave her way through the line of cars.

The town was packed with everyone who'd managed to make it onto a train out of DC. The sidewalks were flooded with people; it took nearly ten minutes to make it down a single street because of all the people that they had to avoid running over.

"_There_," Squall said, pointing at a redbrick apartment building.

Xu pulled the truck as close to the curb as she could get, and killed the sirens. "What's here?"

"It's Rinoa's place." He didn't elaborate; no one asked him to.

He reached for the door handle.

"Hold on," Seifer snapped. "Are you mentally deficient? These people could be infected. Doc, what do you think?"

Kadowaki studied the closest knot of people, who were cautiously avoiding the cop car. "They're calm. Anxious, probably, but not displaying any of the aggression we've seen so far. No obvious wounds on any of them that I can see."

Squall shoved open the door and stepped out.

"If he gets killed, it's on your head," Xu said, glancing at Quistis in the rearview mirror, but the detective ignored her, sliding out of the car right on Squall's heels, her gun drawn.

There was a queue for the elevator once they made it into the building—Squall took point and led them toward the stairway, taking the steps two at a time, quickly, like he expected to find someone in the apartment.

There _was _someone waiting for him, though, when they finally made it to the sixth floor, a small brunette sitting in front of the door, her purse clutched to her chest, a long white skirt tangled around her legs.

"Squall!" she exclaimed, scrambling to her feet. "Oh, thank god, I thought—I was hoping to find Rinoa, but no one could tell me where she was. I thought she was supposed to be here this week while you were in Deling, but…" She flung her arms around him and hugged him fiercely. "I'm so glad you're okay."

Squall accepted the hug for a long moment, and then disentangled himself from the woman's embrace.

Xu coughed, faintly.

"Oh," the woman said. "You have friends with you."

"They're cops. They got me out of DC."

"Let's get inside," Xu said, cutting off any further explanation. "I think the natives are getting restless downstairs."

Squall dug in his pocket for keys, flipping through him until he found the correct one. Quistis stopped him, took the key from his hand, and slowly turned it in the lock. The door opened smoothly. She stepped in, gun out in front of her, the other cops on her flank.

The entrance was textbook, and the apartment was clear.

_xx_

The woman who joined them was Squall's sister, Ellone Loire, on business in Timber for a _Timber Maniacs! _party. She was supposed to take the train back that same night, but, like most of the other people at the function, had been stuck in Timber when the trains stopped running.

"You don't have to stay," Squall said to them, once coffee had been brewed and cups handed out. "I don't need a protection detail."

"We can't exactly go back into the city," Xu said. "And I doubt there are any hotel rooms available, so I think you're stuck with us for at least the evening. We'll discuss our options in the morning." She drained the last dregs of her coffee and set the mug down on the beautifully polished kitchen table.

"Maybe you could help," Ellone offered. "It might be easier to locate Rinoa if we've got some police assistance."

"Elle—"

She turned to look at her brother. "What?"

He got up. "I need to talk to you."

Ellone followed him away, presumably into the bedroom at the far end of the narrow hallway. There was the sound of muffled conversation, and Ellone's audible gasp.

Quistis traced her finger around the rim of her mug. Yesterday, her biggest worry was the pile of paperwork building up on her desk—now they were exiled from their home, and who knew when the infection would be cleared up, or if it would _ever _be cleared up.

If Seifer's irrational love of zombie movies had taught her _anything…_ it was that sitting in a dead woman's apartment, drinking slightly-weak coffee, would by far be the least horrible thing to come.


	4. it comes in flashes

_Four: it comes in flashes_

She was getting really goddamned tired of being woken up in the middle of the night by sudden and inexplicable sounds.

Xu tossed aside her blanket and got up from the couch, padding across the carpet to the window. The rumbling was coming from somewhere outside. She drew back the curtain; it wasn't the middle of the night, she discovered. The sky was a pale gray; the apartment looked out upon the train station, and the pedestrian bridge crossing the tracks.

The rumbling was growing louder. She pushed open the window and stuck her head out, looking to either side. looking down into the street.

People were running.

"Shit," she murmured.

The sound grew, and the floor started shaking with the force of it.

_Earthquake?_

No.

A flash of silver, in the distance, going fast. The apartment had an excellent view of the train station, and Xu suddenly had a very clear picture of what was about to happen.

"Get up!" she yelled, drawing back from the window. "Get up, get away from the windows!"

There were noises all around her. Seifer and Quistis launched themselves out of the nest they'd created in the corner of the living room, grabbing weapons from holsters on the floor. Kadowaki sat bolt upright in the recliner she'd fallen asleep in, and Squall and Ellone emerged from a room down the hall, Ellone rubbing sleep from her eyes.

"What—" Squall began, but Xu held up her hand, keeping her head cocked toward the window.

It didn't take long. There was a long, painful scream, inhumanly loud, metal on metal. Brakes of a train— they had all heard it at least once, but never this loud. Never, ever like this.

Then the impact came.

The sound was deafening.

Time seemed to stretch out endlessly— Xu flung her arms up in front of her face as the windows bowed inward and shattered, sending a million shards straight for them. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ellone's face, and it was smeared with a streak of red.

And then just like that, it was over, a residual shudder working its way through the floorboards, books tumbling off of the shelves lining the apartment walls.

Silence.

"_Shit_," Seifer said, as the rumbling died away.

Xu stood, warily, looking toward the window. The sheer curtains were torn and tattered from the shattering of the windows— a hot wind blew in, carrying the stink of scorched metal and burning flesh.

Seifer pretty much had the right of it.

_xx_

Quistis and Seifer were tagged to check out the situation, while Xu stayed guard in the apartment. It took them nearly twenty minutes to navigate the few blocks to the train station, and when they got closer, Quistis stopped short.

"What?" Seifer said, coming up on her heels and nearly falling right over her.

The scene was a different sort of mayhem, people who had left their safe apartments warily approaching the impact site. The station was demolished, a long, silver train half-buried and twisted on its side. As they approached, Quistis could see movement in the windows, stirrings. Some of the doors had been pried open, and people were climbing out, sliding down the roof of the train to the ground.

"We have to help them," she said. "Just to check and make sure no one's trapped—"

"That could be a whole trainload of infected people waiting to bite your face off," Seifer argued. "I vote for going in the opposite direction of certain death."

"It could also be a whole trainload of _injured_ people!" she shot back. "This is our _job_, to protect and serve, even if the rest of the world's gone to hell, or did you forget that?"

"It's our job in _Deling_. Which, if you forgot, is no longer home to anything human."

"Shut up and cover me, then," she snapped. She didn't know if it was his military academy schooling, or if it was just a delightful personality trait, but Seifer did, more than occasionally, have the uncanny ability to piss her off. She stalked off toward the site, her hand on her gun. Thankfully, he followed her— he could be a royal pain in the ass, but he was one of the few people she trusted implicitly to keep her alive.

There were already a few people helping some of the passengers out of the train, easing them to a nearby sidewalk to sit down, checking for injuries. Quistis quickly located a short, brunette woman in scrubs, calling orders with the brisk efficiency of someone used to getting her way. Immediately, she wished she had agreed to Dr. Kadowaki coming with them, rather than having her stay behind. It looked like they could use all the extra hands they could get.

She flashed her badge. "Quistis Trepe, Deling City police. Can I help?"

"Dr. Tilmitt. Do you have medical training?" the woman asked, wiping a streak of sweat off of her brow. "Someone start getting some of these people to the hospital! Let them know we've got more people coming!'

"I have medical training, yes," Quistis said, when the doctor had finished yelling at a couple of idle hands.

"Oh, thank god. Then yes, you can help. I don't want to get very close to the station in case it hasn't quite settled yet, so we've been trying to get people to move to the back cars. I don't think there were many people on this train, though. It's a red-eye from Balamb— I've taken it before, it's usually pretty empty."

"How many, generally?"

"Maybe a hundred? Two hundred?"

Quistis nodded. "Anyone infected?"

The doctor paused, and blanched. "Oh, god, I didn't even think about that. I just got off work and we've only seen a couple of bites here, mostly on refugees from Deling." She looked down at her hands, like she expected them to lash out of their own accord at Quistis' face. "We need gloves."

"Well," Quistis said, "if something happens, we're going to need a lot more than gloves."

As she reached to help a young man down from the train, somewhere deep inside the belly of the metal beast, someone moaned.

_xx_

At noon, the infection finally hit Timber. It arrived in the form of a tired night-shift ER doctor who wasn't paying much attention as she bandaged the head wound on one of the last train passengers, a man who had gone glassy-eyed and blank. She assumed it was the concussion, or the waiting. Or, her personal favorite, a total lack of caffeine.

She was reaching for the medical tape, and when she turned around with a strip of it in her hand, he was lunging at her, clawing at her face, ripping into her skin with dirty nails.

Selphie Tilmitt was worried about infection of a different sort when she felt his nails gouge her cheek, even as she was falling to the ground, the man landing on top of her, but as his teeth closed around her throat, she realized that she was dead.

Her last conscious thought before the pain overtook her was that the cop from DC was right.

Then she started screaming.

_xx_

Squall was yelling into the telephone when Seifer and Quistis hauled themselves back to the apartment a little before noon.

"_Dad_- no, stay _there_, we'll come— _Dad_! Hello? Hell-no, do _not_ leave Esthar—dammit, no! Okay. We'll be there— Hello? Hello? _Shit_." He slammed the phone back against its wall cradle. "Asshole," he muttered.

"How is he?" Ellone asked anxiously, clutching a mug in her hands. Her head wound had been treated with a flesh-colored bandage, and Quistis spied the tag of a tea bag hanging over the side of the mug. "Is he alright?"

"He's fine. He's trying to insist on coming out here and getting us."

"Who is 'he'?" Seifer asked idly. "Couldn't help but overhear."

Squall sighed. "My father. He's in Esthar. Uninfected. And he wants to come _here_."

"Esthar's clean?" Quistis asked. "How clean?"

"They haven't been touched, I think," Squall said with a shrug. "Bad connection."

"I'm surprised you got any signal at all," Quistis said, pulling her phone out of her pocket. The "low battery" indicator flashed at her, and when she glanced at the top corner of the screen, she had no signal at all. Her charger was back in her apartment. If she had an apartment left to go back to. She shoved the cell phone back into her pocket— a useless lump of plastic.

"We need to go there," Ellone interrupted."We shouldn't have stayed here for as long as we did."

"We didn't have a _choice_," Squall snapped. "The trains aren't running out of here, and I think you know what happened to the only one we've seen so far."

"We have a car."

"I doubt the ferry is still working."

"Is there any coffee?" Seifer snarled over the argument, peering into the metal carafe, and then banging it against the counter when the answer proved to be in the negative.

"We can _try_." Ellone set down the mug with a thud. "You know what Laguna gets like when he's worried!"

"He worries too much," Squall muttered.

"Wait, wait, wait, wait." Xu snapped the last part of her gun back in place. "Did you say 'Laguna,' like, Laguna _Loire_?"

Squall nodded. "Yeah."

"Like, _president of Esthar_, Laguna Loire?"

"Unfortunately."

Xu stood, and did what was so pivotal in making her captain— she invaded Squall's personal space in a way that made her profoundly intimidating, and Squall very, very uncomfortable. It had gotten her a nigh-unbroken streak of confessions. "I thought you said your last name was Leonhart."

"My mother's last name."

"If you're the president of Esthar's son, why are you in Deling City working as a... day trader? Whatever you said you did."

"Long story." He sidestepped her.

"We're gonna have a long car ride to hear it," Xu said, and shoved her gun back in her holster. "Come on. Let's take a road trip."

"At least let me get some coffee," Seifer snapped. Everyone largely ignored him.

"Why the sudden interest in Esthar?" Quistis asked. Xu had never expressed an opinion on the city before, at least not where Quistis could hear.

Xu shrugged. "If we can do one good thing in this mess, we can at least strengthen our goodwill with Esthar. Besides," she added, heading out of the kitchen. "It's an election year."

_xx_

Seifer was loading a box of food, mostly health-nut food scavenged from the former Miss Heartilly's pantry, into the trunk of the SUV when the mood of the crowded streets started to shift. After the train accident and the mass exodus from Deling, Timber was struggling to handle the overflow of people, making it hard to keep track of what was going on, and making Seifer very, very wary.

He hadn't slept well, and was already on edge, and so it didn't take much provocation for his defenses to go up. He turned away from the trunk, assessing the situation.

People were starting to run, and unless there was some marathon that hadn't been advertised, he decided this was a very bad sign. Especially when the screaming started, and the whole scene started to look _exactly_ like that scene from _Terror of Balamb_, where the zombies started pouring into the streets of the sleepy little town—

Quistis came up behind him, pushing her way through the crowd, a gaily-printed duffel bag of clean clothes scavenged from Rinoa's apartment slung over her shoulder. "What the hell is going on?" she called over the din.

"Get in," he said, and pushed her ahead of him into the trunk, climbing in after her, and yanking the hatch shut. "The others still upstairs?"

"Yeah, but—"

Seifer yanked the car keys out of his pocket and pressed the lock button, sealing them into the truck. "Let's hope they've got the common sense to stay there."

They stared out the big rear window, watching the crowd ebb and swell, parting around the SUV. Several people pounded on the doors, pulling at the handles. Quistis bit her lip, her nervous tick, watching as the tell-tale swerving gait of the infected became more prevalent in the crowd swarming the car.

They could hear the screams coming through the thick glass, and they watched in silence as people tried to fight the infected off. It was a losing battle; the streets were not quite running red with blood, but it would be close to that by the time things died down.

"We need to help them," she said, her voice hollow.

He put a hand on her shoulder, pulling her gently back from the hatch. "If we go out there now, we'll end up just as dead."

She removed her gun from its holster and checked the clip, then slid it back home. "How many bullets do you have?"

"Half a clip," he answered promptly. He didn't even have to check. It wouldn't be nearly enough to make a difference. Xu had stripped the car of pretty much every weapon; DC bred certain invaluable habits, like securing your valuables against looters. "We've got a box of granola bars, and they've got the arsenal."

Quistis didn't respond, just looked outside with wide, disbelieving eyes. She reached back, fumbling against the gray, nubby carpet of the bed for his hand. He caught her mid-scrabble, and squeezed her fingers, trying to figure out how to tell her that it would be okay.

But it would be lying, so he kept his mouth shut, and just held onto her hand tightly.


End file.
